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Tuesday, 19 April 2016

Not Whistling Past Dixie

Although nothing is ever going to persuade me that a person with a Y chromosome, never mind a penis, is a woman (or that the Moral Mondays ministers really believe that, either; watch out for that one), Robert Greene II writes:

At Thursday’s Democratic Party debate, Bernie Sanders
provided the latest defense of his blowout defeats in the Deep South.

“That is the most conservative part of this
great country. That’s the fact. But you know what? We’re out of the Deep South
now. And we’re moving up.”

Hillary Clinton supporters and loyal Democratic Party
liberals seized on Sanders’s comment as an indication of his apathy toward
Southern black voters, the core of Clinton’s support in the region.

I was also dismayed, if for slightly different reasons.

For
me — a Bernie Sanders supporter who is also an African American and a
Southerner — it was disheartening to hear Sanders, a man with a reputation for
standing up for all workers, brush aside the concerns of millions.

The Sanders campaign has the potential to transform
American politics.

Running as an open democratic socialist (albeit within the
confines of the Democratic Party), Sanders has pushed a platform that, if
victorious, would represent a stunning triumph for the American left.

Yet if
that victory came at the cost of writing of the South, it would be a hollow
one.

He lostSouth Carolina, the first test south of the
Mason-Dixon line, by 47 points (or by almost 180,000 votes). He came up short
in Florida by almost 500,000 votes.

And Clinton bested him in Georgia and
Alabama by over 300,000 votes and in North Carolina by 150,000 votes.

In short,
the Vermont senator hasn’t just struggled in the South — he hasn’t even been
competitive there. But lopsided losses shouldn’t dissuade Sanders from
training his sights on the South.

Here are four reasons that Sanders — and
leftists more broadly — ignores the region at his own peril.

1. Liberals might not need the South, but leftists do.

For decades, liberals have said they don’t have to look to
the South in a general election.

Books such as Thomas Schaller’sWhistling Past Dixiehave argued that the Democratic
Party can mine votes exclusively from the North.

And there is, after all, a precedent for this: the
Republican Party of the late nineteenth century slowly learned how to succeed
without Southern states, where the vicious reaction to Reconstruction had
broken African American political power for generations.

In 2008 and 2012,
Democrats picked off states such as Virginia and North Carolina — but they
would have won the Electoral College even without them.

Despite performing well in the Deep South, there is nothing
to suggest Hillary Clinton would campaign in the region in the general
election. Advisers of hers could look at an electoral map and suggest she
concentrate on the Midwest and West.

Yet regardless of who wins the Democratic Party nomination,
leaving the South behind would doom millions of voters who refuse to go along
with the region’s right-wing Republicans.

In an election where conservatives
are already conceding defeat, doing nothing to rally Southern voters and lay
the groundwork for a fresh, radical democratic politics would be an enormous
missed opportunity.

2. Ignoring the South has already cost Sanders this primary
season.

More support from Southern voters would have given Sanders
more delegates going deeper into the campaign.

Going forward, a stepped-up
campaign in the South could galvanize voters in a region accustomed to
conservative Republican rule and acquiescent, anemic state Democratic parties.

Part of the weakness of progressive movements in the South
is due to low voter turnout — in South Carolina, the 2014 midterms witnessed
thelowest level of participationin forty years.

And while Clinton
supporters have excoriated Sanders for not doing more to support down-ticket
races, the Democratic Party as a whole has failed to present a plan to win
majorities in the House or Senate during the Obama administration.

Howard Dean’s “Fifty-State Strategy,”
which briefly gave the Democrats control of the House and Senate in 2006 and
arguably played a role in Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, seems to
be a distant memory.

Hopefully Sanders doesn’t suffer from the same amnesia.

As
Matt Karprecently pointed out, Sanders’s core issue of
battling economic inequality has significant resonance among African-American
voters, and many of these voters are in the South.

Brushing them aside means
missing out on a chance to make the South politically competitive for
progressive policies.

3. History shows that what starts in the South doesn’t stay
in the South.

Political and economic developments in the American south
have a tendency to impact the rest of the country.

Indeed, Southerners have played a major role in not just
conservatism’s history, but in the history of undercutting left politics from
the center — take the rise of theDemocratic Leadership Council and Clintonism.

Or think about what Clintonism looked to replace.

As Ira
Katznelson chronicles inFear Itself,even the most social-democratic
legislation in US history was shaped partially by conservative politicians from
the South. Indeed, without their votes such legislation would never have
passed.

The Great Society programs of the 1960s — not to mention
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 — only passed during
a brief high point of liberal political power.

Southerners backed the New Deal (as long as it did not
upset the Jim Crow status quo), and a Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, pushed the
major liberal acts of 1964–65 through Congress.

Any attempt at significant
reform on behalf of all Americans requires garnering at least some Southern
support.

In brief, you can either ignore the South and hope the rest
of the nation can unite behind progressive polices, or allow entrenched
conservative interests from the South to damage reform efforts.

Building
genuine change within the South means fighting those elements on the ground.

4. There’s a history of left-wing activism below the
Mason-Dixon line.

The Civil Rights Movement is the most well-known example of
what energized Southerners can do to change a region, but it is not the only
one.

Often the fight for progressive politics has come at great
personal sacrifice.

As the 1979 deaths of five left-wing activists in
Greensboro, North Carolina at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan illustrate,
Southerners have paid a steep price for holding back not a metaphorical
fascism, but the real, terrifying version that has been in America since the
Reconstruction era.

Donald Trump’s victories in Southern primaries, the
Charleston massacre perpetrated by white supremacist Dylann Roof, and the
passage ofanti-transgender lawsunder the guise of “religious freedom”
might be seen as the latest examples of the region’s hopelessly reactionary
hue.

But for every one of those moments, we can point to
movements like North Carolina’s Moral Mondays, historical figures like Fannie
Lou Hamer or Jim Hightower, and achievements like the creation of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964.

If the United States is to truly witness a political
revolution, it cannot leave behind the South. Too much sweat, tears, and blood
have been shed by courageous African Americans and defiant white Southerners to
simply whistle past Dixie.